imecth

Consoles have been pcs under the hood for a while, they could run pc games just fine, they choose not to. Sony could implement a browser for their 500$ walled garden, they choose not to. Sony could let you install another OS on the PS5, they choose not to.

wait 900 seconds before every post.

This only applies for the first post, you’re probably deleting their cookie that tracks your browser.

You can use gamescope with anything, it’s a micro compositor. You can add it to the launch parameters in steam, lutris has an option to start games with gamescope, or you can simply open the game with gamescope and wine from the terminal.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope

Gamescope is great to use even on desktops, it runs the games in its own little shell which is particularly good for compatibility with old games where you can change stuff like resolution, fullscreen, keyboard layout… without impacting your distro.

The layout is just gnome, pretty sure you can change the DE if you want to, and yeah it does look like android which isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering desktop usage is getting replaced by mobile.

Steam and the other loaders (lutris, bottles…) take care of all the compatibility stuff just fine; the tweaks are actually the ones that can be bothersome to get, not that the performance difference matters much anyways…

These limited things are always just time based exclusives, publishers aren’t gonna leave money on the table.

Premium currencies are just very anti-consumer, I’m sure you know most of the arguments against it so I won’t reiterate them.

GGG are great developers, but their sales department is as predatory as every other game, FOMO sales, lootboxes, premium currencies, supporter packs… Not being p2w (the standard on pc btw) is really the only good thing you can say about their current monetization.

There’s plenty to explore for sure, and the 3 acts will give most people a run for their money, but the game is incomplete, literally missing half the campaign. The missing weapons and skill gems means you actually don’t have many options that aren’t railroaded, there’s also going to be a lot of balance fixes and probably item drop buffs; EA is never the best time to start a game.

Given you don’t pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

Most new players buying into EA are not going to stick around. Also fuck premium currencies, this shit is manipulative as hell, not to mention it makes refunds needlessly complicated.

Well that’s how poe2 is usually described, i personally have never played any of the souls game so i can’t attest to the similarity. Poe2 is a lot more boss centric.

The dodge roll has its niche: avoid boss mechanics. You can spam it so it doesn’t provide any movement advantage, i think it gives iframes on targeted attacks, but you can still get hit by AOEs. However, because you can’t attack while rolling you want to avoid doing it unless you really need to.

They slowed down the game tremendously and added dodge roll.

For anyone that’s not familiar with the game, it’s a slow top-down arpg with a souls like gameplay. The game is challenging but the progression can currently be tedious and unrewarding, the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet; I recommend waiting for the full release if you want to give it a shot.

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No. Platforms as used here by the EU is just an intermediary between the business and the client. It has nothing to do with the OS. If you want a counter example look at meta and tiktok which are designated gatekeepers.

Look at the first paragraph you quoted. “Significant impact on internal market” what significant impact does Valve exert on the internal gaming market?

Their very existence is the impact, they have cornered the pc market and have an entrenched position as an intermediary between every game publisher and player.

Look at the do’s and don’t’s. What don’t’s are they actively using to hurt other platforms in the space? What part of their business practices specifically do you feel falls afoul of the Digital Markets Act?

Their current practices are mostly fine, although i’m sure a couple of these could worked on further for valve. The tricky part is ensuring that they toe the line.

They clearly fall into all 3 of these requirements. The only requirement that falls somewhat short is their size, and given the current growth of the pc market and their entrenched position, either they’ll hit it naturally or the EU will widen the net first.

Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing any of a pre-defined set of digital services (‘core platform services’), such as online search engines, app stores, and messenger services. These companies have:

- a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market and are active in multiple EU countries;
- a strong intermediation position, meaning that they link a large user base to a large number of businesses;
- an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that their position has been stable over time.

The only reason steam evaded the label is that they’re too small and the EU has bigger fish to fry atm.

The EU has a term for what steam is: a gatekeeper. Sure our current overlord is mostly benign, but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean they should be allowed free reign.

I dislike microsoft as much as the next guy, but xbox doesn’t have a monopoly on phones, or really any presence at all. Competition on android is good for everyone but google.

Concord: The game nobody played but everyone remembers.

Can’t wait for the re-release trying to scrounge up a few bucks.